When nostalgia is a silent heartache: A poem 

I can still take out the childhood shoes 

from the cupboard of memories 

Remember, how I walked, splashing puddles 

when the rainclouds finally abandoned the streets 

 It was like an invisible, unassumed living freedom 

When the earth exhaled its newly alive breath and smells  

Somehow, unparalleled fortune is in finding one’s feet 

in the familiar playgrounds of expectations that are only the least 

I even imagined that someone took me by the hand 

to the girls’ (my sisters) convent across the street 

But it was my actual wander from the structure of my own school 

Because I felt lost in every regimented place,  

For, my innocence was an absenteeism in the imposed present 

Because there only seems the knowledge of happiness within 

and the metaphors that materialise as love from home, your own 

which you somehow feel existing though not exhibited  

I may not remember every instance of a cocooned freedom 

But there is no fugue about the condition of enchantment 

And there was no frontage of foppishness among simple minds 

that had the authencity validated by an integral purity 

All around the world, in the sixties and seventies,  

there was an awakening that challenged conventions 

It did not pervade the soul of the slumbering expanse of India,  

that was still journeying lazily among its bullock carts and rusticity 

I don’t regret that those temples have been invaded by modern materialism 

But there is a hidden nostalgia that causes me heartache!